Service providers such as telecommunications companies will deploy new network equipment as network devices. The service providers generally will manually provision several items such as an IP address, default gateway, management VLAN, device name, and device location before the new network equipment can be seen or managed by a remote network manager, for example, a Network Management System (NMS), also referred to often as a Network Management Administrator (NMA) by some skilled in the art. An example of a NMS is a management system as manufactured and supplied by ADTRAN, INC. of Huntsville, Ala. This process is time consuming and error prone and requires operators to spend large amounts of time at remote sites. Also, if any information used for provisioning is not set correctly, it may require additional trips such as “truck rolls” to remote sites to correct it.
A newly deployed network device, also referred to as a network element, can announce itself to the network manager using a different number of techniques once it is connected into the communications network. If no information or data has been provisioned into the newly deployed network device, however, the network manager acting as a network administrator has no way to know the location of the newly deployed device, and thus, the network manager does not know the identity of the newly deployed device using existing mechanisms.